Danish Last Names

How this list was compiled: Names and figures: Statistics Denmark, 'Names in the whole population' (https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/borgere/navne/navne-i-hele-befolkningen, read 2 October 2026): its table of the 20 most common last names on 1 January 2026, and its search 'How many people are called...?', asked once for each name, which gives the number of men and women with that last name in 2026. Statistics Denmark publishes ranks for the top 20 only, so only those cards carry a rank; the other cards carry the figure alone, and the bands are our own grouping of the figures. Which names are listed: the top 20, every name in English Wiktionary's 'Danish surnames' category (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Danish_surnames, 233 entries) and every name with an article in English Wikipedia's 'Danish-language surnames' category (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Danish-language_surnames, 404 articles), both read the same day, kept when Statistics Denmark gives a figure for the spelling; it gives none for a name with fewer than three holders. After a second reader's check the same day ten names carried by fewer than 100 people were taken off: Sorensen, Jorgensen and Jurgensen, which stand in the encyclopedia category as spellings without ø beside Sørensen and Jørgensen; and seven names from the encyclopedia category alone (their articles were read that day): three whose article gives the surname another origin (Born, German; Warkentin, German-Russian; Werfel, German) and four whose article says nothing of where the name is from and files it under another language's surnames as well as Danish (Harry, English; Kvint, Russian; Norin, Swedish; Persen, Norwegian). Vermund, which that test would also catch, stays because its article files it under Danish given names too. Eighteen names that the Norwegian last names list of this site also holds, each carried by fewer than 1,000 people in Denmark, were then left off, because the site's rule is that at most 40 in 100 names of a list may also stand on its other pages. 459 names. It is not the complete list of Denmark's last names, and a name missing here may be more common than one that is listed. A card is marked as a -sen name, with the father's name, only where the name's Danish entry on English Wiktionary calls it a patronymic and names the father (both names where it gives two, as for Olsen, Thomsen and Laursen, and the older short form where it gives one, as for Jepsen and Lassen), or where the Denmark table of English Wikipedia's 'Scandinavian family name etymology' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_family_name_etymology#Denmark) does; other names ending in -sen are unmarked. Names ending in -gaard or -gård are marked from the spelling, with the dictionary's meaning of the word gård (farm, estate; yard); the entry for Nygaard gives it as another form of Nygård. A few cards quote the word their Danish entry derives the name from. The letters æ, ø and å are kept. No speaker of Danish has read the list. Licence: Statistics Denmark's content may be reused with the source named, which it likens to CC BY 4.0 (https://www.dst.dk/en/presse/kildeangivelse, read 2 October 2026): source Statistics Denmark, www.dst.dk; the bands are our own grouping. Meanings: English Wiktionary and English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).